


Leaf Words

by eris_of_imladris



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Funyarinpa - Freeform, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:27:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28247613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris_of_imladris/pseuds/eris_of_imladris
Summary: Hope, faith, love, and luck have no place in Aoi’s life until he can give a certain bookmark away. Spoiler warning for 999.
Relationships: Kurashiki Akane & Kurashiki Aoi
Kudos: 5





	Leaf Words

When the bookmark leaves Aoi’s hands, it feels like a huge weight has lifted from him as well.

This is one of the essential things that needed to happen here, beyond coming to the second-class cabin in the first place. Just the fact that it’s gone from him makes him feel like he’s gotten rid of a bomb, like the one everyone thinks is in their stomachs. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s a step. The first real step.

He catches Akane’s eye. It’s hard to suppress the smile he wants to share, but there’s a persona he needs to maintain if he wants the rest of this to work. There are too many timelines where it doesn’t, and the one where it does feels as fragile as the little plant pressed into paper that he just dumped on a confused-looking Junpei.

Akane risks a small smile and a wink, then hurries off to a different part of the room, looking for pieces of the dog puzzle. 

He can tell from her face that she believes this is going to be the right path, that there’s no reason to believe Junpei will deviate. But it’s harder for Aoi to trust someone he’s never met who he knows will screw things up five times before doing the right thing, and there’s no way of knowing where they are on that path.

If Akane was blowing their cover and talking to him instead of playing with the puzzle piece Junpei just found, she would tell him to have faith. “I’m here, so that has to count for something,” she’d say, and she’d tell him to believe in everything they’ve done together. She always had so much faith as a kid, and even after everything that happened, she just seemed to transfer that faith to herself. She always believed she could get herself out, even if just with the simple evidence that she was still alive, even if only partially.

But hope was useless, and Akane couldn’t convince him otherwise. Just hoping things would go well had no place in a world where you had to make everything happen yourself, where if you just stared up at the sky and hoped, everything would end in snails and death and fire. Hope played no part in their meticulous plan to make sure Akane stayed alive, and it played no part in Aoi solving these puzzles. Even if he hoped this wasn’t a route where he was stabbed or slashed or hacked to pieces, his hope would change nothing. His actions would.

Love might have a justification for places outside of this warehouse, he thinks as Junpei starts shuffling the pieces on the wall until they take the shape familiar to Aoi. Akane looks like she’s trying so hard to impress him, and Aoi wishes he could go over and tell her she’s doing well with her plan. That’s love. But love alone won’t save her.

The worst was luck, Aoi thinks as Lotus and Akane theorize over the picture. How could anyone believe in something that was completely random? Back before all of this, he used to think it was bad luck that their parents died and bad luck that they didn’t have much money. But ever since he and Akane found themselves on the Gigantic, there was no such thing as luck anymore. Luck was something people liked to say when they were fortunate in life. Luck had no place in the life of someone whose little sister was the one kid out of everyone on the boat thrown into the incinerator.

“What the hell is a funyarinpa?” asks Lotus, and Aoi realizes he’s been zoning out waiting for Junpei to figure out the dog puzzle. Akane, who has studied pictures like this for years, who would know it’s a picture of a dog in her sleep, lets out a giggle that quickly turns into genuine laughter.

Aoi barely listens to Lotus’ explanation of the British experiment that might expose Junpei to the idea of the morphogenetic field for the first time. All he can focus on is the flush on Akane’s face that doesn’t come from fever or fire, the way she’s holding herself less stiffly, the sound of her laugh. It’s a sound he hasn’t heard in a very long time. Not since he believed in the stupid words behind the bookmark he had just given away.

Junpei starts heading from the 2nd-class cabin to the kitchen, another step in the route he needs to go. Akane starts following him, her fever diminished, her chatter renewed. If Aoi closes his eyes, he could almost imagine them as children, when the world still seemed like a place when hope, faith, love, and luck were real.

Aoi sighsd, running his hands over the wall. Love was still real, he had to admit. Love was what kept him and Akane on this journey together even though he could have given up years ago, prioritized himself. Some part of this was still prioritizing himself, but it was at least mostly for her. He couldn’t see himself living without his kid sister, but she couldn’t live at all without him founding Crash Keys and putting this whole game together.

And he couldn’t deny feeling at least a little bit hopeful now that Junpei was on the right path. He had the bookmark, which meant Aoi wasn’t going to have an axe’s blade as his last memory. There was a little flicker of hope - the same that carried the siblings to this day in the first place - that Junpei was smart enough to do the right thing.

Or, his randomness would carry the day. Akane said there was often no rhyme or reason to Junpei’s behavior, and Aoi supposed that by the end of the path, luck might be involved. It wouldn’t be the only thing there and unlike what he believed when he was a kid, luck couldn’t save people on its own. There needed to be hard work and belief that that would, well, work.

And it wasn’t quite faith that Aoi felt as he looked at the dog - the “funyarinpa,” as Junpei called it for some reason not even Akane seemed able to fathom. He didn’t believe that some supernatural force was going to come along and fix everything - at least, not one that he and Akane weren’t steering. But he did have faith that his sister knew what she was doing, and had prepared both him and the warehouse-ship well enough that they just might make it out of there alive.

It wasn’t quite the belief he had before everything happened. But it would have to be enough to get him through the rest of this game - and beyond, if things worked out.

“When things work out,” he made himself think again as he passed through the doorway. That, at least, he could try. Even if Junpei somehow screwed things up from here, there was still a chance. And maybe if Junpei believed in those things, he could carry them through into the good timeline where those things are real.


End file.
